good/bad faith
Apr. 10th, 2005 10:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelidonI just posted this quote from one of Rollo May's excellent books as a comment to someone else's LJ, and it reminded me how apropos it is to life in general, so I'll post it here as well. I've found all of May's books to be very insightful. Ah, humility...
"Freud's concepts of resistance and repression are descriptions of the profound difficulty of "knowing thyself." Sartre's concept of "bad faith" and "good faith" is also an illustration--the dilemma of honesty with one's self lying in the fact that there is always some element of self-distortion in our acts and beliefs. The man who thinks he is in "good faith" is at that point in "bad faith," and the only way to be in "good faith" is to know that you are in bad faith, i.e., to know that there is some element of distortion and illusion in your perception. The moral problem is not simply a matter of believing in one's convictions and acting on them, for people's convictions can be as dominating and destructive, if not more so, than mere pragmatic positions. The moral problem is the relentless endeavor to find one's own convictions and at the same time to admit that there will always be in them an element of self-aggrandizement and distortion. Here is where Socrates' principle of humility is essential..."
-- Rollo May, _Love and Will_
"Freud's concepts of resistance and repression are descriptions of the profound difficulty of "knowing thyself." Sartre's concept of "bad faith" and "good faith" is also an illustration--the dilemma of honesty with one's self lying in the fact that there is always some element of self-distortion in our acts and beliefs. The man who thinks he is in "good faith" is at that point in "bad faith," and the only way to be in "good faith" is to know that you are in bad faith, i.e., to know that there is some element of distortion and illusion in your perception. The moral problem is not simply a matter of believing in one's convictions and acting on them, for people's convictions can be as dominating and destructive, if not more so, than mere pragmatic positions. The moral problem is the relentless endeavor to find one's own convictions and at the same time to admit that there will always be in them an element of self-aggrandizement and distortion. Here is where Socrates' principle of humility is essential..."
-- Rollo May, _Love and Will_
